Italian Modernism : Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde

__Italian Modernism__ was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of __Decadentismo__ and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Electronic Format Disclaimer: Images removed at the request of the rights holder. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 Foreword: After The Conquest of the Stars 9 Contributors 25 Modernism in Italy: An Introduction 29 PART I. Modernism in Context 63 1. Italy and Modernity: Peculiarities and Contradictions 63 PART II. Decadence and Aestheticism 93 2. Sensuous Maladies: The Construction of Italian Decadentismo 93 3. D'Annunzio, Duse, Wilde, Bernhardt: Author and Actress between Decadence and Modernity 114 4. Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism 158 5. Overcoming Aestheticism 195 6 Transtextual Patterns: Guido Gozzano Between Epic and Elegy in ‘Goa: “La Dourada”’ 219 PART III. Avant-Garde 249 7. Modernism in Florence: The Politics of Avant-Garde Culture in the Early Twentieth Century 249 8. Back to the Future: Temporal Ambivalences in F.T. Marinetti's Writings 271 9. Ungaretti, Reader of Futurism 295 10. Of Thresholds and Boundaries: Luigi Pirandello between Modernity and Modernism 322 PART IV. The Return to Order: Metafisica, Novecentismo 337 11. Modernism and the Quest for the Real: On Massimo Bontempelli's Minnie la Candida 337 12. De Chirico's Heroes: The Victors of Modernity 379 13. Gender, Identity, and the Return to Order . in the Early Works of Paola Masino 406 PART V. Towards the Postmodern 431 14. Representing Repetition: Appropriation in de Chirico and After 431 Index 479

Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth.

Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.

Electronic Format Disclaimer: Images removed at the request of the rights holder.

"This study is the first attempt in English to provide a comprehensive examination of Italian literary modernism. The volume documents how the previous critical categories employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, and have prevented a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time. Italian Modernism will be of interest not only to Italianists but to specialists in a variety of fields, including comparative literature, fine arts, and cultural studies."--Jacket